Repeat Customer

In Ken Matsuzaki’s quest to pass the New York State bar exam, the seventeenth time was the charm. The test is offered twice a year, in February and July, and Matsuzaki had sat for every one since completing Cardozo law school, in early 2005. He’s taken the bar in Brooklyn, in Albany, in the vast Javits Center, in Manhattan (“I don’t like that one,” he said. “Lines too long at the bathrooms”), and, this past February, in Buffalo. “I like Buffalo,” he said. “Less crowded. I could reserve a hotel very close to the testing place. Just three minute walk from the hotel. Good access. I can focus on study during my stay. In New York City, many kinds of things attract me.”

Matsuzaki’s persistence is especially notable because he lives in Tokyo. He uses his vacation days to travel to New York, and his costs amount to about two thousand dollars a throw. (“I really owe my wife a lot. She has been very patient for me.”) What makes his dedication even more remarkable is that he has no professional obligation to be a lawyer in New York. In Tokyo, he works in the legal department of a large advertising agency, and he has no plans to practice law in New York or even to move here. By the end, his pursuit was mostly spiritual. “If I give up, maybe I would be betraying myself, so I don’t like to do such kind of thing,” Matsuzaki said. “I like one expression: ‘Constant dripping wears off a stone.’ Perseverance finally works.”

As every lawyer knows, the bar exam is a dubious exercise, measuring not so much the skills of law practice as the ability to cram. Still, failure is embarrassing, if not professionally crippling. Notable non-passers include First Ladies (Hillary Clinton), governors (Jerry Brown, Pete Wilson), big-city mayors (Ed Koch, Richard M. Daley, Antonio R. Villaraigosa), and hunks (John F. Kennedy, Jr.). All except Villaraigosa eventually passed on later attempts.

In part, Matsuzaki has used the tests as a way of paying tribute to a city and a state that had adopted him. He had fallen in love with New York on a brief trip when he was a young man, later studied at New York University, and was determined to go to law school in the city. “Cardozo is not so popular among Japanese people,” he said. “There are not so many non-Americans. That was good for me, because one of my purposes was to get familiar with American people.” But, as the years passed, his distance from the city made studying harder. Like many American law students, he took a bar-review class for his first try, back in 2005, but after that he studied on his own, during his free time in Japan. “The knowledge easily drops off your head,” he said. “I thought that it would be better to do it continuously. That’s why I took a total of seventeen times.” As he showed up for test after test, Matsuzaki began to recognize some of his fellow repeat customers. “But then I stopped seeing them, because eventually all of them passed,” he said.

For Matsuzaki, the stakes were never higher than his last attempt, in Buffalo. He knew that the requirements for foreign students were going to change the next time, to include courses in professional responsibility, which he had never studied. “This was the last chance for me,” he said. In May, he received an e-mail with the test results from the bar examiners in New York. “I was not so brave to open it,” he said. “May is a holiday in Japan, our holy time. In early May, I spent those days with my wife. I confessed to her that I couldn’t open it. I waited two days. Finally, on the Saturday after breakfast, I determined to push it, to open it, and there it was: congratulations. Finally, congratulations.” His celebration was modest. “The biggest difference is I can go back to an ordinary life,” Matsuzaki said.

The length of Matsuzaki’s journey was hardly record-breaking. According to John McAlary, the executive director of the New York State Board of Law Examiners, there are two people who have taken the test more than sixty times. Their stories, however, do not have Matsuzaki’s sweet conclusion. “They don’t come close,” McAlary said. ♦